For a long time scientists thought that the brain was capable of growing and changing only during childhood. How very wrong we were! It was an unfortunate misunderstanding that, for a long time, confused the general knowledge about how we learn and grow in intellectual capacity over the course of our lives.

Now we know that the brain is capable of great change throughout life, even in old age. We call the brain's ability to grow neuroplasticity. The brain can grow and change in response to both physical and mental activities. Brain tissue can change in response to damage. Even picking up a new musical instrument can change the way your brain works.

We are all quite familiar with the effects of exercise on muscles. When you work out a muscle, it grows stronger. If you stop exercising a muscle, it begins to atrophy. The brain is not a muscle, but when you exercise it, it grows stronger in its own way. Similarly, when you stop using it, it atrophies in its own way. Basically, challenging your brain makes you smarter. Whatever you do on a regular basis affects the way your brain works.

Getting smarter sounds like a great outcome. Who doesn’t want to be smarter? The brain exercise market is now worth over $1B in the US alone. That means that a lot of people are spending a lot of money to get smarter, but will they achieve their goals? That’s the real question.

When a person seeks out brain training for themselves or a loved one, it’s probably in response to some problem in their lives. If a child is not at the head of his class, his parent starts researching brain exercises. If a middle manager gets passed over for a promotion for the third time, she might seek out brain exercises. When the matriarch of the family starts forgetting everyone’s name, that’s when we google, “brain exercises."

Real life problems are very complicated. It’s hard to identify the true limiting factor in any problem. Why is Tommy not learning to read? When new glasses don’t solve the problem the next step is brain training. Why is the middle manager not witness to her own meteoric rise at work? Is this limitation really something to do with her ability to think? Real life is a complex game of cause and effect. Being smarter isn’t always the answer.

In a perfect world, the middle manager would do a few weeks or months of brain exercises and soon her life would be all roses. She'd be happy all the time and brilliant in every capacity. She would solve every new problem immediately and her boss would initiate the paperwork for her promotion. Obviously, it doesn’t happen like this.

For the sake of argument, let’s assume that brain exercises do strengthen your brain. When you work on focus, you increase your ability to focus. When spend days or weeks learning to solve problems creatively, you open your mind to more fluid intelligence. We have lots of evidence to show that when you do specific exercises, you get better at doing the particular mental activity that you were busy exercising. No one is arguing that brain exercises don’t strengthen the brain. But the real question is whether a stronger, faster, or smarter brain actually helps you in life.

Real limitations in life are not generally caused by a lack of intelligence. Most people are held back in life because they can’t get along with others, they attach themselves to a company that isn’t good for their career, or they are too scatterbrained (or bored) to focus on one thing long enough to do it well. These are not problems with fluid intelligence and problem solving. If you tend to pick fights everywhere you go, no amount of technical problem solving is going to help you get past your limitations.

However, those who seek out brain training have recognized that there is a real life problem they’d like to solve, and awareness of a problem is the first step in actually solving it. Self-awareness, or the ability to recognize how you have a hand in your own dissatisfaction, is a big step toward solving your real-life problems no matter what’s causing them. The danger with brain training is that you might rely on the specific training exercises to solve your problems instead of doing the necessary self-exploration that will help you uncover the true source of what’s going on.

Opponents say that brain training is a placebo effect. In fact, it is, but that’s not the damning evidence that it sounds like it is. We use the placebo effect as a basis for comparison when we want to determine whether a treatment is effective. The assumption here is that the placebo effect is the null, or a non-effect. However, that’s not what the placebo effect really is.

Basically, the placebo effect is what happens when your brain takes care of the problem instead of relying on a drug or external therapy to do so. So, using the placebo effect as a comparison for brain training is kind of a circular argument. It’s like comparing the effect of the brain’s ability to manage a problem on its own to the effect of the brain’s ability to manage a problem with brain exercises. Either way, you are measuring the brain’s capacity to solve the problem.

The placebo effect is a neuroplastic response to a problem. The fact that the results of brain training looks like the placebo effect makes a ton of sense. The brain is solving the problem through neuroplasticity instead of relying on drugs or therapies. It’s actually a positive result when the placebo effect matches the brain training effect.

The placebo effect is often so powerful in improving a patient’s problems that it overshadows the effect of a real therapy. It’s not that the placebo effect isn’t a real solution, it’s that it's such a good solution that it is often just as good as taking a medication. The placebo effect is powerful and if brain training is producing the same effects then that sounds like evidence toward the power of brain training.

For best results with your own brain training you can focus on a few main points:

Awareness - When you can be increasingly aware of your own experiences, reactions, and limitation, you will be able to guide your own brain training regimen. Paying attention to the times you get stuck, and the experiences that you find the most upsetting will guide you better than any other diagnosis. Anger, frustration, and irritation are fantastic signposts pointing you to the exercises that will benefit you.

Make it up - You don’t have to join a gym to get exercise and you don’t have to use professional services to exercise your brain. Do things that you think are hard. If you struggle with public speaking, do that. If you are a terrible reader, do that. If you hate math, do that. Therapeutic exercise is about doing the things that are hard.

Dig deeper - Don’t go looking for reasons to explain your weaknesses. Sometimes a diagnosis of ADD or a learning disability just gives people an excuse to stop trying. Instead, look for patterns. What kinds of behaviors do you exhibit? How have you benefited in life by having that quirk or foible? Often we have weaknesses because they served us well at some time in our lives. Having the ability to "check out" might now look like a poor attention span, but it might have been a coping mechanism for a challenge while you were growing up. Uncover those types of observations and you might find it easier to stop unconsciously maintaining your poor attention span. After all, you are all grown up now and those old reasons for your coping mechanism are gone.

Brain training is helpful to many. Use it wisely and like any kind of training, change it up as needed. Just think about your mental capabilities in terms of arm days, leg days, and ab workouts and you’ve got the right idea.